The Graphic Design of Tech Brands

Graphic designers, good graphic designers, that is, are artists that can skillfully merge their vision with that of their client. Revered works of medieval and Renaissance art, among them the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, were produced under a patron's direction. Modern-day commissioned pieces, like the formaldehyde-dipped tiger shark that is Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," are not rendered less representative of their creator.

Commercial design can infiltrate and alter the collective consciousness in the same way technology can. But when design and technology are spoken of in conjunction, it's usually industrial design, the design of the actual product, that's the topic. Yet that product often comes to the attention of the general public and finds its place in society by its accompanying branding, packaging, and advertising—all the work of a graphic designer.

The designers not suited to the task get admonition from designer Michael Bierut in his essay "Why Designers Can't Think," in which he extols the "insatiable curiosity not only about art and design, but culture, science, politics, and history" of the great graphic designers of the 1940s and 1950s. And those who shirk the job because of its subject matter get no sympathy from Paul Rand, the prolific père of American graphic design, in the essay "Advertisement: Ad Vivum or Ad Hominem." He wrote, "The very raison d'etre of the commercial artist, namely, to help sell products and services, is often cited by him as the reason he cannot do good work. To my mind, this attitude is just as often the culprit as is the basic nature of the work."

There have been many pairings of technology and graphic design that rise above an ad merely to be flipped past in a magazine or a package hastily discarded. Take a look at how some of the greats of graphic design have made their mark in tech.

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